The Dream is damned and Dreamer too if Dreaming's all that Dreamers do.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Brothers in Famine

For the first time in months I met with my team as a team. The present budget crisis (is it real or imaginary this time? What's the difference?) has been targeted at overtime and especially "specialty teams". We are a "specialty team". If you get taken hostage inside the jail or there is an inmate uprising, we deal with it- that's our specialty. We'll be expected to deal with it whether we have trained or not.

The last time this happened, it was eight months and it took everything Dre and I had to hold the team together. We did, and we came back stronger. As a team. Everything as a team.

We cheated to day. Due to workman's compensation issues and completely unfounded fears that the media will label us as a rogue unit or a cabal, we have not only had our training budget frozen, but we have been FORBIDDEN to train on our own time. We train on our own all the time- this is a group of men and women (woman) that live for training. We put in time in the gym, time at martial arts or shooting or climbing and most of us read.

Training as a unit, though, is hard. So today we cheated. It's time for semi-annual qualifications at the agency. We 'accidentally' signed up for the same day, on a day when all the instructors were team members. Qualification was budgeted for three hours. We kicked it out in a third of that for some time to work together on our own skills.

Not as much time as we needed and honestly, we didn't use it efficiently. We work three different shifts and seven or eight different assignments, so a lot of the time was spent catching up, reconnecting. With a little bitching about the lack of training.

It's a good crew. I miss them. For the first time in a long time, shooting didn't seem like a chore.